Sunday Sermon [Mass Psychosis]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Sometimes, not telling the truth is an act of moral cowardice...

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-=[ An Open Letter to Thinking Americans ]=-

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Neoconservatism is fanaticism; a political fundamentalism poisoning the intellectual vibrancy essential for a functional democracy. For the last 30-40 years, America’s anti-intellectual tradition has been magnified by a new species of mindless anti-rationalism. A fanaticism feeding on and fed by an ignorant demographic addicted to an avalanche of video images and an echo chamber of noise that leaves no room for reflection and logic.

Reason being the first fatality of fanaticism, one cannot successfully reason with a fanatic. Eventually, one comes to the inescapable realization that you cannot describe the universe to an individual who still thinks in pre-Copernican terms. While there should be room for reasoned social policy debate, the facts remain: the earth is round, the sun does not revolve around the earth, and, at least for people with relatively large forebrains, the theory of evolution is a foregone conclusion. Similarly, our singularly expensive and ineffective market-driven healthcare system has been an utter failure -- by any measure.

Neoconservatism is a mass psychosis masquerading as a political movement. A part of me always knew this, but I always left room to compensate for my own biases. A part of me held out hope that the angry, mostly uneducated whites, who comprise the spine of the movement, would somehow wake up to the fact that they are unwitting dupes in a class war that steals from them as much as anyone else. A class war headed by a minuscule fraction of our population: the ten percent that owns almost all of the wealth in this country.

The people of this movement, driven by fear and hate, will never wake up.

There is no reason to take the Republican Party seriously. It has become a parade of one political folly after another. The GOP is the developmentally challenged child of a warped political movement. My less politically radical friends like to talk about historical context -- how what goes for conservatism today really isn’t conservatism. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was American conservatism that has spent nearly four decades throwing open the doors to the asylum. Beginning with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 through the Reagan campaigns and presidency; the NCPAC campaigns of the same era; the marriage of cynicism with religious idiocy; the barrage of think tank junk science; the madness of Newt Gingrich’s contract on America; the various and sustained stupidities aimed at Clinton, all of culminating in the embarrassment of Bush the Idiot. All of this and more was and is modern conservatism taken to its illogical conclusion. Want to know neoconservtism? Look no further than the financial and social debris of the Bush II administration. Shit, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s a little late for sensitive conservative intellectuals to reflect how it was that all that monkey shit ended up on the walls.

Want to get an idea of the GOP’s “leadership”? Look at Dick Cheney, a moral coward of historical proportions, explain once again to a cowed media that one free mass casualty attack doesn’t count. Why hasn’t one journalist challenged Dick that by his own standard, every two-term president kept us safer than his guys did? That’s a lot like closing the barn door after the horses have gone.

Intelligent or even serious people don’t lead in that party, and the leaders of it (Michael Steele? Sarah Palin? Newt Gingrich?) are not serious people. It is a major political party run now as an elaborate public spectacle completely in the service of fanatical radio talk-show hosts. Why do serious political journalists take the out-of-control train wreck that is the Republican Party seriously, ignoring the evidence plainly in front of their own eyes? Even more baffling, why does a Democratic president, and an overwhelmingly Democratic congress, both elected at least in part because the country had determined that the Republicans had gone completely round the bend, care what these people think about anything? Why does a party led by people who think the president is going to hypnotize schoolchildren with his magical homosexual-loving-Socialist eyeballs scare the living shit out of the democrats?

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good?!! Shit! By my reckoning, the good has many legitimate enemies. Evil is the enemy of the good. Greed is the enemy of the good. Ignorance is the enemy of the good. Cowardice is the enemy of the good. How about we all worry, for once, about those enemies of the good -- all of which are evident in the campaign to make sure we never reform the morally reprehensible and criminally negligent manner in which we deliver healthcare in this country?

Instead, we get goobers advocating against their own self-interests on behalf of the same entities that will most likely deny them proper healthcare. Oh yeah, watch The Dems sign off on a castrated health reform bill and then run in 2010 on their support of what will amount to a massive giveaway to the insurance companies -- a group of institutions whom everyone I know hates. Of course, the corporate press will then deliberate incessantly on why the administration couldn’t work with “serious conservative voices” on a “bipartisan” plan, as though they even exist. The Glenn Beck “Socialism! Fascism! Communism! Nigger!” batshit cocksuckers will be conveniently forgotten heard in the background dutifully yelping, “We’re No. 1! We’re no. 1!”

Fuck them: you can’t reason with fanatics.

Eddie